I promise I'll shut up after this, but I thought those of you who are
interested in the population trends of the kinglets or any other species should
look in the Christmas Count data from this and previous years. It might be
interesting to compare December trends vs February trends. I checked the
Chapel Hill, Durham, and Jordan Lake counts for this and the last five years
for kinglets and for Chapel Hill and Durham they were much lower this year than
almost all of the previous years on the Christmas Count. For Jordan Lake the
GC Kinglets were only slightly lower than average, but the RC Kinglets were
much lower. Until this year, 1997 seems to be the worst year for all
concerned. Of course, other factors like the number of counters or the weather
conditions on the count day may have played a big role.
As for the study out west, I guess it's no big surprise that bird
numbers decline in general during the winter - populations in general have only
one way to go when no reproduction is taking place. And I'm not surprised that
rough winters are harder on populations than easy winters. The question is,
why should this particular event be harder on kinglets than on other song
birds? Did this particular event affect their food supply more than the other
birds? Unless there was a thick coating of ice on the trees for some time?
P.S. Now that you mentioned it JF, I think that article was in Natural
History.
Marilyn Westphal/Hendersonville, NC mjwestphal@unca.edu